reboot problem after instal

When Acronis True Image 9 had finished loading, it announced that a reboot would be required. However, after shutting down Windows XP Professional, attempting to reboot produced the following message on a black screen.

Not yet having made a boot disk under Acronis, this instruction cannot be followed. Further, attempting to start Windows XP Professional with its emergency boot disk simply results in a message that the media should be removed and a key pressed. This leads back to the original message given above.

There seems no obvious way to break out of this circular problem. Suggestions would be gratefully received. Shortly, Help!!!

Please fix your hard drive's MBR either by booting from Windows XP Installation CD and issuing "fixmbr" command in Recovery Console or using one of the methods described in Acronis Help Post.

If that does not help then please create Acronis Report in the way described below:

- Download and run Acronis Report Utility;
- Select the "Create Bootable Floppy" option;
- Insert a blank floppy disk in the A: drive and proceed with creation of the bootable floppy;
- Boot the computer having the issue from this diskette and wait for report creation process to finish;
- Collect the report file from the floppy.

Please also let us know if you have activated Acronis Startup Recovery Manager upon the Acronis True Image 9.0 Home installation.

Please submit a request for technical support. Attach the report.txt file collected to your request along with the step-by-step description of the actions taken before the problem appeared and the link to this thread. We will investigate the problem and try to provide you with the solution.

Thank you for replying but I had already tried all the suggestions you have made without success. As I noted, the machine was in a loop which prevented a boot disk being used. Originally I did not have a Acronis boot disk but ultimately found the Reporting Utility and made one up. However by then, I had partially solved the problem and for your information, this is how it was done.

I found after some trial and error, that if I hit F8 during the early stage of boot up and before the message described in my first post ran, the machine would switch into a boot menu and I could select the VIA Hard Disk after which the normal boot sequence would occur. I then installed the Recovery Console from the Win XP CD and attempted to cure the problem that way. However, upon running RC at boot up (again after the F8 routine) I got a Blue Screen and the same again after another try.

I then started sniffing around and to cut a long story short, finally discovered in the Device Manager that Acronis had corrupted the SATA driver which reported as not working. Deleting this driver and then reinstalling it, allowed the machine to boot up normally. Hurrah!

Anyway, for anyone who suffers such a wretched problem, maybe this will provide some clues as all the approaches that you and other people have suggested that relied on booting from boot disks or CDs, simply did not work as the loop continued to drop one back into an earlier state.

With kind regards from a much more cheerful operator.

Incidentally, the back up using Acronis True Image 9 ultimately went ahead as it should and I have also now been able to make the recovery disks which should keep me out of trouble if anything else horrible occurs.